De Essing Vocals With Sonnox Oxford Supresser

In this one, I thought we would take a look at de-essing a vocal using the Oxford Suppresser, which is one of my favorite de-essing tools, mainly due to its expansive tweakability. It’s got tons of settings. You can really dial in exactly what you want.

So anyways, let’s get into it. I’m going to play the track here. This is the last chorus of the tune and here we go.

This thing has two main modes. You can use — if you just want to throw it on and fly, you can dump it into Easy Mode, pretty much. It gives you the main graph, the visual interface, you can grab these bars here to select your frequency band, because this thing is pretty much a multi-band compressor.

Then it’s got a threshold slider. So how much de-essing would you like to happen. You can dump the effect in or out. It’s got a wet and dry mix as well, which is awesome. What else.

Oh, the listen side is really great. So you can listen to the entire band as-is. Let me solo this.

[vocals]

Right. Then we can go inside the band we’ve selected, so we’re going to be listening to everything inside these two points.

[vocals, filtered]

Right. Then we can listen outside of the band.

[vocals, filtered]

All really great things.

Then you have this slider down here where you can — say you get sort of the range you’re looking for, you can slide this around and really nudge it into the perfect spot.

[vocals]

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Then the red line here that pops up — this vertical line is really great, because it clues you into sort of the most harsh frequency, I believe is what it’s doing.

So it gives you a lot of visual references, which is great, but if we hit the More Mode, where you get all the features, you have the actual mode the de-esser is going to be working in, which is going to be either wide or band, so if you wanted to work across the entire spectrum or just what you want to select — for vocals I pretty much use band all the time.

Level tracking I always leave it on auto. Then, this is really cool, you can tweak the attack, hold, and release of the de-esser itself, which is always nice.

So you have all of these really great parameters, plus you can grab the magnifying lens, zoom in on exactly what’s going on.

[vocals]

I like it. A lot of guys I know use three or four different de-essers because there isn’t just one that kind of gets everything.

With this one, I feel like I can pretty much get in and it’s going to work on pretty much and source, and vocal, just because there’s so much tweakability, and it’s really easy to find. It’s really easy to find the bad frequencies with this plug-in.

So let me play this one more time for you, and I’ll bypass this on and off.

[vocals]

[mix]

And that’s it.

One more thing before I let you go, there’s also the ratio side of things over here on the right, which is really nice.

So you can go from really gentle sounding de-essing. Something like this.

[vocals]

To something heavier.

[vocals]

To all the way remove.

[vocals]

Which gets really crazy.

[vocals]

And that’s the Oxford Suppresser, guys.

Leave me a comment down below, like the video, give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. Let me know what you’re using as de-essers. I always like to know, and I will see you guys in the next video.